Defend Your Research: Hurt Feelings? You Could Take a Pain Reliever…

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The finding: Daily doses of acetaminophen alleviate hurt feelings and reduce neural activity related to the pain of social rejection.

The research: The University of Kentucky’s C. Nathan DeWall asked 62 undergraduates to take 1,000 milligrams of acetaminophen or a placebo for three weeks. Each evening they recorded how much social pain they’d felt that day. The hurt feelings of those who took acetaminophen decreased significantly over time; people who took the placebo showed no change. In a related study, functional MRIs showed that people who had taken acetaminophen also had less activity in the brain regions that respond to emotional pain.

DeWall: My research is really just a continuation of extensive studies over the past three decades showing a significant overlap between social and physical pain processes in animals. Rat pups that are freaking out during separation from a parent become less upset when they’re injected with opiates—and not because of any sedative effect. The analgesic actually reduces their distress. No one had looked at whether the same thing might be true of humans. Our experiments used acetaminophen for the obvious reason that it’s safer and simpler for people to take on a daily basis than an opiate.

Key Number

1 out of 4

In DeWall’s research, subjects showed hostility and aggressiveness when told that no one in a four-person group wanted to work with them. If they learned that just one person did want to work with them, their aggression dropped dramatically.

HBR: How can you tell if the pain reliever reduces distress or just masks it?

Our subjects knew they’d been rejected; it simply didn’t bother them as much. In another part of our research, we had 25 undergraduates undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging while playing a computer-based game in which they were socially included or excluded. During rejection, people who’d taken acetaminophen for three weeks actually showed less activity in the areas of the brain associated with social pain.

No. We experience social pain differently from physical pain, but there are many commonalities. Probably what happened over the course of human evolution is that as we came to rely more on social inclusion for survival, the body’s physical-pain system became the basis for a social-pain system designed to ensure we weren’t fending for ourselves in a hostile world. As a result, the social-pain system functions much like its older cousin, which means it responds similarly to analgesics.

Our social-pain system functions much like our physical-pain system, and responds to analgesics.

So responses to rejection are hardwired into us, like responses to physical pain?

Exclusion certainly provokes intense reactions. People who’ve been rejected are more likely to overeat, procrastinate, take financial risks, perform poorly on measures of intelligence, and act aggressively. One thing I want to explore is whether acetaminophen can also help reduce these behavioral consequences. In any case, people will do almost anything to avoid rejection, whether by a friend, a lover, or an employer.

A friend or lover—I can see that. But an employer?

Fear of rejection is probably one reason people make a big effort not to fail at work. Work can be tedious and harmful to people’s health and relationships. Money is thought to be the main compensation for those sacrifices, but don’t forget the benefits of social acceptance. The sense of belonging is one of the most important positives of work. In our research, when we ask people to imagine being let go from their jobs, the first thing they tend to say is, “I’m going to lose all my friends.” Praise, perks, raises, office parties, outings—employees perceive all those things as evidence of acceptance. They know that to continue to be included, they must avoid failure—they must maintain a certain level of performance. The fear of rejection probably also plays out in another way: It may prevent people from being creative.

That’s troubling, because creative thinking is what companies need to grow.

True, but creativity comes with a risk of failure—not all imaginative projects work out. Fear of rejection or even outright termination may sap people’s will to be creative. Think of a manager who tells employees to create an iPad app and says that the developer whose app contains the most errors will be fired. On the surface, this may be a rational strategy, but employees’ creativity just walked out the door. Google, on the other hand, encourages employees to spend time on activities that are personally meaningful to them, signaling that it doesn’t disapprove of initiatives that go nowhere. If your project fizzles, you won’t face rejection. A policy like that tends to engender a sense of acceptance, and the research literature suggests this leads to greater innovation.

Should all companies be like Google?

They don’t have to go that far. An experiment my colleagues and I did showed that a sense of well-being is boosted by just a little acceptance. When subjects were told that all four people in a group preferred not to work with them, they demonstrated hostility and aggressiveness, but their aggression diminished dramatically if they learned that just one person in the group wanted to work with them. The positive effect of each additional accepting person was much smaller, however. By offering employees frequent tastes of acceptance, firms can harness the full potential of their creativity.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to give them acetaminophen?

Definitely not! A lot more research is needed before anyone can say that any analgesic is an effective means of treating social pain. And drugs aren’t necessary: It’s not hard to create an environment that reduces employees’ anxiety about rejection. Rigid rules, for example, send a message that the deviations in thinking that are necessary for creativity won’t be tolerated. Greater organizational flexibility can send a message of acceptance, breeding a greater sense of security.

But businesses don’t exist to make us feel accepted. Shouldn’t employees just suck it up?

Our culture tells us not to make a big deal out of rejection: “Don’t be a whiner.” But it’s just as big a deal as breaking a bone. Even if we try to soldier on, our socially attuned nervous systems are telling us that exclusion is very bad for our survival prospects.

C. Nathan DeWall (nathan.dewall@uky.edu) is an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Kentucky.

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